How to Use Boredom and Friction to Boost Creativity and Literally Alter Your and Your Students’ Brain Chemistry

In today’s fast-paced digital world, kids are used to experiences that are instant, engaging and frictionless. Platforms such as Roblox, TikTok and other popular apps and videos aimed at children are designed to remove waiting time, reduce effort and deliver continuous stimulation. Tasks and content are convenient, captivating, and deliberately overwhelming to keep their attention. Research suggests that a completely frictionless environment may be working against an important goal of education, which is building creative, resilient, and focused thinkers.

Funnily enough, two things many educators try to avoid, boredom and friction, may actually be powerful tools for learning and healthy brain development. By intentionally designing opportunities for productive struggle, waiting, and open-ended thinking, teachers can support creativity, attention and motivation in both themselves and their students.

Fun Fact: Recent studies show that just a two-week break from social media can result in the reversal of 10 years of age-related cognitive decline, in other words, the regaining of a decade of attention.

Why boredom isn’t the enemy

Boredom often has a negative reputation in classrooms. However, psychologists have found that periods of low stimulation can activate the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which is the system associated with daydreaming, reflection, imagination and creative thinking.

When the mind isn’t occupied by constant input, it begins to make connections, replay experiences and generate ideas. Research has shown that people who complete a mundane or boring task often perform better on subsequent creative tasks compared to those who were continuously stimulated (Mann & Cadman, 2014).

For students, this means that quiet thinking time can support idea generation, that unstructured moments allow for deeper thought processing, and that constant entertainment might reduce creative capacity.

In a classroom context, allowing space for thinking rather than filling every moment can support more original responses and independent learning.

 

The role of friction in learning

When I refer to friction, I am specifically referring to effort, difficulty, delay or resistance in a task. This concept is closely related to ‘desirable difficulties’, which are challenges that make learning feel harder in the short term but improve understanding and long-term retention (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).

Today’s digital environments often remove friction entirely, granting users instant rewards, immediate feedback, endless choice, no waiting time, and minimal cognitive effort.

Games like Roblox, for example, are designed to keep users engaged through rapid stimulation and low barriers to success. While engaging, this can make real-world tasks like writing, problem-solving, and reading complex texts feel comparatively slow and effortful. Students may then avoid tasks that require sustained attention or delayed gratification.

Adding productive friction helps students build persistence and resilience, allowing them to use executive function skills and build their tolerance for effort and frustration.

Neurologically, overcoming challenge activates the brain’s dopamine system, reinforcing motivation and a sense of achievement when effort leads to success.

 

Brain chemistry: effort, reward and motivation

Dopamine is often described as the brain’s ‘reward chemical’, but it is more accurately linked to motivation and effort-based learning. When students experience small wins after sustained effort, dopamine reinforces the behaviour, making them more likely to persist in the future.

However, when rewards are instant and constant (as it is in many digital environments), the brain can become accustomed to high-frequency stimulation, reducing tolerance for slower tasks that require some effort.

Balancing stimulation with effort helps students to rebuild attention stamina, experience satisfaction from achievement, and develop intrinsic motivation.

 

Practical ways to use boredom and friction in the classroom

The goal is not to make learning unnecessarily difficult, but to introduce intentional pauses, challenges, and open-ended thinking.

1. Build in thinking time

• Ask a question and allow 30–60 seconds of silent thinking.
• Encourage students to jot ideas down before sharing.

2. Reduce constant stimulation

• Avoid overloading lessons with videos, transitions or entertainment.
• Alternate high-engagement activities with quiet work.
• Try to incorporate lessons that are device-free where possible.

3. Use productive struggle

• Present problems before teaching the solution.
• Explain that there may be multiple solutions to a problem.
• Normalise phrases like: “This should feel a bit challenging.”

Note: The concept of cognitive reframing can really come in handy here.

For example, simply replacing words like ‘difficult’ or ‘hard’ with ‘challenging’ puts a positive spin on the task at hand. When you hear a student using those words, ask them to reframe their thinking and language. The more often they do this, it will become a habit, putting a positive spin on how they approach challenges.

4. Introduce creative constraints

Creativity can absolutely thrive when students are given limits. Here are some limits you can give them:

• Write a story using only 100 words.
• Solve a maths problem without a calculator.
• Design a project using limited materials.

5. Schedule low-structure time

Especially in primary settings:

• Quiet reading or drawing without specific outcomes.
• Brainstorms and journal keeping.
• Reflection periods at the end of lessons.

6. Teach students about effort and the brain

Older students benefit from understanding:

• Effort strengthens neural pathways.
• Struggle is part of learning, not a sign of failure.
• Dopamine increases when challenges are overcome.

 

In a world designed to be frictionless, classrooms can become one of the few environments where students learn to think deeply, tolerate effort and experience the satisfaction of genuine achievement.

Boredom, when used intentionally, becomes space for imagination. Friction becomes the pathway to mastery. And together, they help shape learners who are not only capable, but creative, resilient and ready for the complexities of life away from screens.

 

References

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. Psychology and the Real World.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A., & Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: Implications of the brain’s default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 352–364.

Kang, M. J. et al. (2009). The wick in the candle of learning: Epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory. Psychological Science, 20(8), 963–973.

Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173.

OECD (2021). Digital Education Outlook: Pushing the Frontiers with Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Robots. OECD Publishing.

American Academy of Pediatrics (2016). Media and young minds. Pediatrics, 138(5).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/basics/default-mode-network

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20922-0

https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/screen-usage-linked-to-differences-in-brain-structure-in-young-children/